The Commercial Appeal - Go Memphis
How to send a taste of Memphis nationwide
It’s never been easier to ship a taste of Memphis to your friends and family.
From barbecue to sweets, Memphis eateries are shipping their products nationwide through online store Goldbelly.
Goldbelly, which was founded in 2013, ships food from iconic restaurants throughout the country. During the pandemic, this e-commerce platform doubled its customers and the number of restaurants offering food from its site.
Sugar Avenue Bakery is the newest addition to Goldbelly’s Memphis offerings.
Owner Ed Crenshaw said the decision to ship solely with Goldbelly will help his new online bakery expand.
“We have had great success locally shipping ourselves,” said Crenshaw, who launched an online retail division of his commercial bakery last summer. “Goldbelly will help give us exposure to people outside of Memphis.”
Goldbelly ships all Sugar Avenue’s Southern style cakes and dessert sauces, including its popular Bourbon Caramel Cake and Rice Krispy Cake.
Shotwell Candy Co. was one of the first Memphis companies to sell on Goldbelly.
“I founded Shotwell Candy in 2012, and Goldbelly was started early in 2013. Shotwell Candy first started selling caramel on Goldbelly in September 2013,” owner Jerrod Smith said. “I figured it would be a great way to increase brand presence online, add sales and reach customers that I wouldn’t otherwise reach.”
Smith’s hunch was right on target. His sales on Goldbelly have been strong from day one. “Sales have been steady over the years and have increased fairly dramatically in the past 18 months. On the Goldbelly platform alone, Shotwell Candy’s sales are currently up 374% year-over-year,” he said.
His best-selling item on Goldbelly is a three-pack of Shotwell Candy’s 4ounce Original Salted Caramel boxes.
Get legendary Memphis BBQ nationwide
Other Memphis businesses have also benefited from Goldbelly’s broad reach.
Central BBQ, like Shotwell Candy, has been shipping through Goldbelly since 2013.
“Shipping our products nationwide through these channels has allowed us to share more of our competition-worthy slow-cooked Memphis-style barbecue with more folks from all over the country,” said Brian Wyatt, Central BBQ’S chief operating officer.
Central BBQ’S top seller on Goldbelly is its Ribs & Pulled Pork Dinner for Four combo pack, which includes one pound
of pulled pork, one slab of ribs plus sauce and dry rub.
The Rendezvous started selling on Goldbelly about five years ago. Anna Vergos Blair said Goldbelly inspired the popular Memphis BBQ Nachos Kit.
“Four or five years ago, Joe Ariel and his wife, Vanessa Torrivilla, came down to the restaurant to film a show for Food Network about the different offerings at Goldbelly,” Blair said. “At one point, we had them try the pork nachos, just to show the different ways you could use the pulled pork.
“Immediately, they were like, ‘ You need to ship these.’ That was the beginning of the Memphis BBQ Nachos box that we ship nationwide today.”
Memphis Barbecue Company started selling on Goldbelly in May. Owner Melissa Cookston said her best-selling package is a Ribs and Pulled Pork Dinner for four. Each order includes a slab of baby back ribs and two pounds of pulled pork, with sauce and dry rub included.
Pete & Sam’s also joined Goldbelly in May. Now, fans of this family-owned Italian restaurant that has served Memphians for more than 70 years can enjoy its signature thin crust pizza, no matter where they live.
Frozen pizzas, including the famous barbecue pizza, can be ordered in threeor six-packs.
Central BBQ, The Rendezvous, Memphis Barbecue Company and Shotwell Candy Company also have their own inhouse shipping options, but each say Goldbelly is an integral part of their company’s revenue stream.
“I think Goldbelly helps expose The Rendezvous to a new and wider audience,” Blair said.
Last month Memphis rapper Duke Deuce made news with the announcement that he was going to be part of the Motown Records/capitol Music Group family.
This week Motown, in conjunction with Atlanta’s Quality Control Music and Deuce’s own Made Men Movement imprint, have confirmed the release of his new album, “Duke Nukem,” due out Friday.
Following on the heels of the album’s first single, “Soldiers Steppin,” Deuce has just released a new track titled “Spin.” The song features an appearance by Gucci Mane protégé Foogiano.
The collaboration between Deuce and Foogiano finds the former playing up their prowess on the mic and in the streets: “Me and Foogiano rep the same thang, we folks,” raps Deuce, “playing with my bread n**** f*** around and get toast.”
Deuce has been part of the Atlantabased indie label Quality Control Music since 2019. The label has a joint deal with Motown/capitol and has developed a roster of hip-hop stars via the
pact, including Lil Baby and City Girls. Duke formally made the move up to the Motown/capitol roster in January.
Following a pair of widely hailed “Memphis Massacre” mixtape projects, “Duke Nukem” represents Deuce’s more formal album debut. The 28-year-old Deuce (born Patavious Isom) has already worked with genre titans like Lil
Jon, Juicy J and Project Pat, and has been consciously linking himself with the Bluff City’s hip-hop history to claim his position as the latter-day King of Crunk.
A second-generation hip-hopper, Deuce grew up in the studio with his father, producer Duke Nitty, whose credits include projects by Gangsta Blac, Nasty Nardo, Dem Thugs and Mobb Lyfe.
Deuce came up in the hothouse atmosphere of late 1990s/early 2000s Memphis rap, a scene dominated by the likes of Three 6 Mafia, 8Ball and MJG among others. He spent several years crafting his style, one that drew equally on a foundation of classic crunk and dark, sinister Memphis sounds, while adding his own post-millennial energy to the mix.
Released in 2018, Deuce’s breakout “Whole Lotta” single would come to define his throwback M-town aesthetic, and launch his career.
With “Duke Nukem,” Deuce seems poised to take the next step in his stillburgeoning career, with what his label is hyping as an album filled with “crushing and menacing Memphis style” rap.
A couple years ago, as he was searching for inspiration to write a new record, roots-rocker John Paul Keith heard a divine and distinctly Memphis sound in the night.
“I was at home one evening and heard a car pass by blasting Al Green’s ‘Love and Happiness,’ which was recorded just a couple miles away from where I was living,” recalls Keith. “I was struck by how Howard Grimes’ drumming just seems to embody something about the feel and the pace of life for me here. I thought to myself, ‘Howard Grimes is the rhythm of the city.’ My next thought was, ‘That sounds like a title
track.’”
Released this past week, Keith’s fifth solo album, “The Rhythm of the City,” finds him expanding his approach on a horn-heavy collection. A record steeped in the geography and culture of Memphis – which Keith has called home for the last 15 years – the new album finds a sweet spot where the sound of Sun blues, Stax soul and Hi R&B all meet.
“I feel like the approach, the whole vibe, came about organically from playing Beale Street and Graceland and working with horn sections more frequently,” says Keith, who has moved between small combo and bigger band formats while performing live over the last few years.
“Most cities have one sound, but there are a lot of different Memphis sounds,” he says. “I tried to make a record that honors that.”
For Keith, the album also represents the culmination of a long creative journey. A Knoxville native, Keith was an Americana prodigy of sorts, earning a pair of major-label deals (once as a founding member of the Viceroys, then later leading the Nevers) before turning 23. He then slogged it out for a decade, bouncing between bands in New York City, Nashville and Birmingham. Keith eventually quit music in frustration after a series of shady managers, bad business deals and professional dead ends soured him.
Moving to Memphis in 2005 – and steeping himself both in the city’s rich tradition and thriving contemporary scene – heralded a rebirth for Keith. He would go on to launch a solo career, releasing a series of exquisite and widely acclaimed records on the Mississippi label Big Legal Mess: 2009’s “Spills and Thrills,” 2011’s “The Man That Time Forgot,” 2013’s “Memphis Circa 3AM” – as well as a live record plus an EP and LP as Motel Mirrors, a collaboration with fellow Memphis artist Amy Lavere and Texas guitar great Will Sexton.
After having Sexton produce his 2018 album “Heart Shaped Shadow” – which began to explore more deep soul-styled arrangements – Keith elected to selfproduce his next project.
Recorded mostly live to tape at Electraphonic Studios, and engineered by Keith’s frequent collaborator, Scott Bomar of the Bo-keys, “Rhythm” feels like Keith’s most fully realized recording. The 10-track disc is filled with a mix of stinging love songs (“How Can You Walk Away”), halting heartbreakers (“I Don’t
Wanna Know”), bluesy rambles (“If I Had Money”) and soul explorations (“How Do I Say No) that feel like instant classics.
Keith’s further immersion in a Bluff City soul aesthetic came, in part, from his work with Bomar writing songs for Hi Records veteran Don Bryant’s last album. “Some of the songs on this album started out as possible ideas for Don, like ‘The Sun’s Gonna Shine Again,’” says Keith.
Self-producing for the first time, Keith proved his own harshest critic and editor. “I had a fair amount of material for the album,” notes Keith. “In fact, I shelved a bunch of songs that I didn’t feel were worthy of making the cut. I had 15 or so songs ready to go, and we trimmed it down to the strongest 10.”
Keen-eared listeners will catch a bevy of Memphis references and callbacks across the record. “We put an electric sitar on ‘The Sun’s Gonna Shine Again’ in homage to [American Studios guitarist]
the late Reggie Young,” says Keith. “‘Love Love Love’ was inspired by Johnny Burnette and the Rock N Roll Trio. Even the airplane sound on the title track is a reference to The Box Tops’ ‘The Letter.’”
The ability to bring still-active musical legends in Memphis also had its advantages. “I hired ‘Hubby’ Turner [from Hi Rhythm section] to play on the album because, at the time, I was constantly listening to his work with Syl Johnson,” says Keith. “It still blows my mind that I was just able to call him up to come play on my record.”
Keith was further aided by a talented crew of his Memphis contemporaries. The album features Tierinii and Tikyra Jackson of Grammy-nominated combo Southern Avenue on background vocals, Al Gamble of St. Paul & The Broken Bones on keyboards, Danny Banks (Nicole Atkins Band) on drums, and Matthew Wilson of John Nemeth & The Blue Dreamers on bass. Trumpeter Marc
Franklin, along with tenor and baritone saxmen Art Edmaiston and Kirk Smothers, comprise a hard-hitting horn section.
“The Rhythm of the City,” was released internationally this past week by Wild Honey Records, a label based in Italy. Over the last decade Keith has developed a strong European following, touring the continent regularly. While Keith can’t support the album on the road due to COVID-19, he has been staging a weekly solo livestream concert each Monday since the early days of the pandemic.
“I never meant to do it this long. But it’s been a way for me to spend time with my fans every week and have this little virtual community where we just spend Monday nights hanging out,” he says. “I’ve made a big effort to bring in different material and learn new songs for it. So it’s been a challenge and rewarding in a lot of ways. And has helped me get by professionally. But it’s still no substitute for the real thing.
“But going forward, even after COVID, I think livestreaming will remain,” adds Keith. “It does give you access to audience members you might never reach otherwise. So I don’t think that’s going anywhere.”
Keith is hoping to get a little more ambitious and stage a full-band livestream to mark the release of the record, but he admits it’s a challenge to find a room and stage large enough that can accommodate his nine-piece band safely. “With COVID, every aspect of playing music has been affected even down to how far I can stand from another musician,” he says.
In the meantime, Keith has plans to continue releasing videos for songs off the album. The videos for lead single “How Can You Walk Away” and the follow-up “The Sun’s Gonna Shine Again” were filmed and edited by Keith on his iphone.
“That’s the other story of the pandemic for musicians, is being forced to learn new things,” he says. “I had to learn about video in order to livestream and that led me to start shooting my own music videos on my phone. That’s something I never would’ve done if not for the pandemic and the fact that we’ve had to stop touring.”
“I’m having to get creative in terms of promoting the record,” says Keith, with a laugh. “And if a Luddite like me is filming and editing his own videos … well, then, it’s a brave new world for sure.”
Film critics from the South have named “Nomadland” the best movie of 2020.
Director Chloé Zhao’s documentarystyle drama about a woman (Frances Mcdormand) who loses her factory job and becomes a van-dwelling nomad in the modern American West was “an overwhelming favorite” among voters in the 29th annual poll of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, according to SEFCA president Matt Goldberg.
“It’s clear that Zhao’s thoughtful, deeply humanistic and heartfelt portrait of life at the fringes of our country connected with our members across the Southeast,” said Goldberg, a critic with Collider, an entertainment website.
Regarded as a top contender for most of the major Oscars, “Nomadland” currently is at several area movie theaters, and is on the MXT screen at the Collierville and the IMAX screen at the Paradiso, where it opened Feb. 5. In addition, the movie became available Feb. 19 on the Hulu streaming service.
Founded in 1992, SEFCA represents 71 critics from nine Southern states. The organization has three members in Memphis: John Beifuss of The Commercial Appeal; Chris Herrington of the Daily Memphian; and Chris Mccoy of the Memphis Flyer, a new member. (Herrington voted for “Nomadland” for best picture, while Mccoy went with Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” and Beifuss chose Kitty Green’s “The Assistant.”)
SEFCA’S signature honor, the Gene Wyatt Award, which goes to a film that “best embodies the spirit of the South,” went to another story of economic struggle within outsider cultures in rural America: writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s “Minari,” about a South Korean family that relocates to the farm country
of Arkansas. The movie – which had its local premiere at the Summer Quartet Drive-in during the 2020 Indie Memphis Film Festival – opened Friday, Feb. 19, at the Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill; it currently is unavailable online.
SEFCA announced its 2020 awardswinners Monday. Typically, SEFCA polls its members in December, but elongated its “2020” season until February 2021, to conform with similar eligibility adjustments changes made by the Oscars and other film organizations, in recognition of the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here is the complete list of SEFCA winners.
Top 10:
1. “Nomadland”
2. “Minari”
3. “The Trial of the Chicago 7” 4. “Promising Young Woman” 5. “Sound of Metal”
6. “One Night in Miami...”
7. “Da 5 Bloods”
8. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” 9. “Soul”
10. “Mank”
Best Actor: Chadwick Boseman, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Runner-up: Riz Ahmed, “Sound of Metal.”
Best Actress: Frances Mcdormand, “Nomadland.” Runner-up: Carey Mulligan, “Promising Young Woman.”
Best Supporting Actor: Sacha Baron Cohen, “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” Runner-up: Paul Raci, “Sound of Metal.”
Best Supporting Actress: Youn Yuhjung, “Minari.” Runner-up: Maria Bakalova, “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.”
Best Ensemble: “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” Runner-up: “One Night in Miami...”
Best Director: Chloé Zhao, “Nomad
land.” Runner-up: Regina King, “One Night in Miami...”
Best Original Screenplay: Lee Isaac Chung, “Minari.” Runner-up: Emerald Fennell, “Promising Young Woman.”
Best Adapted Screenplay: Chloé Zhao, “Nomadland.” Runner-up: Kemp Powers, “One Night in Miami...”
Best Documentary: “Time.” RunnerUp: “Dick Johnson Is Dead.”
Best Foreign-language Film: “Another Round” (Denmark). Runner-up: “Bacurau“(Brazil).
Best Animated Film: ner-up: “Wolfwalkers.”
Best Cinematography: Joshua James Richards, “Nomadland.” RunnerUp: Erik Messerschmidt, “Mank.”
The Gene Wyatt Award: “Minari.” Runner-up: “One Night in Miami...”
“Soul.” Run
In Florian Zeller’s “The Father,” Anthony, 80, in the grip of dementia, is a captain ready to go down with the ship. Overhearing his daughter and son-inlaw contemplating a nursing home, he curses them as “rats” abandoning him. Pacing his London apartment in a bath robe, he mounts a noble resistance. “I am not leaving my flat!” he shouts. But if the battle lines are clear for Anthony, little else is. Every time Anthony leaves a room, when he re-enters, the light has shifted, the furniture is rearranged and sometimes even the people are different. In staging and perspective, “The Father” mimics the disorientation of dementia.
Anthony, a regally theatrical man played by Anthony Hopkins, is an actor who every time he takes the stage, the scene has changed before him. Timelines, settings and faces are all kaleidoscoped by a splintered memory. His ship – his flat – might not even be his.
“The Father,” which opens in theaters Friday, is Zeller’s directorial debut but he’s a well-known French playwright and author who’s here adapting his own play, one that’s been put on around the world. (On Broadway, the father, named Andre, was played by Frank Langella. In London, it was Alfred Molina.)
Dementia is often seen on screen but usually from the viewpoint of an intimate watching their loved one recede away. Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” with Jean-louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, which likewise remained set within an elegant apartment, gazed with a cold, clear eye on a great love violently fading.
Haneke’s film had larger reverberations because of its actors – both titans of French film approaching the end – and Zeller has likewise suggested – or rather insisted on – real-life echoes. Hopkins, 83, shares his character’s name, and “The Father” could be taken as a late, self-aware wail from a magnificent performer. Zeller has also cast Olivia Colman as Anthony’s caretaking daughter, Anne, and another Olivia, Olivia Williams, as who Anne sometimes appears to Anthony.
To me, these winks reinforced the feeling that “The Father” is a clever concept, not a profound film. Terrifically acted and finely crafted though it is, it’s a brilliant but hollow exercise in perspective that calls more attention to its artful orchestration than it does life or loss.
And yet, few, if any films, have so fully illuminated the nightmare and confusion of dementia. Rather than gawk at it, “The Father” puts us smack in the middle of Anthony’s personal hall of mirrors. We are just as unmoored as he is, left to figure out what’s real and what’s not as scenes are played and then, with shifting details, replayed: Anne coming home with chicken for dinner; her husband, Paul (Rufus Sewell), sitting with the newspaper; an interview with a prospective nurse (Imogen Poots).
In every encounter, Anthony struggles for comprehension. He’s doubtful when facts don’t line up, and outraged when he’s contradicted. Sometimes,
pangs of realization seem to flit across his face when he’s at a loss he can’t resolve. The stranger he finds in the apartment tells him he’s Anne’s husband. The flat, the man tells him, isn’t his. His wristwatch (another pun) keeps going missing.
To see Hopkins play all these everfluctuating turns of mood is riveting. He has grasped, at least for a proud man like Anthony, how one’s ego keeps fighting a battle it doesn’t know is already lost.
The resentment for a reality that won’t cohere. “What is this nonsense?”
asks Anthony, furious. For an actor so intense, so rigorously unsentimental, this is his Lear.
Yet “The Father” often feels like a clinical puzzle to work out. By the time the fog clears – for us, not Anthony – and the splices of memory become synced, a final scene pushes “The Father” into territory beyond the simulation of Anthony’s condition. A late scene brings a rush of heartbreaking clarity. It clears up the specifics of Anthony’s situation while also pondering what, perhaps, there’s still to cling to when everything else slips away.
You won’t be able to stop thinking about “It’s A Sin.”
HBO Max’s superb series (streaming now, eeee out of four), which aired in the U.K. in January, is the story of the 1980s AIDS crisis in London as told by a group of young friends experiencing fear, tragedy and community. Set during the pivotal decade of the epidemic, the series is heartbreaking but also joyful and wickedly funny: a deeply affecting character portrait of young lives snuffed out far too soon. It is easily the best series of 2021 so far, an affecting, fantastic piece of television.
Created by Russell T. Davies (“Queer as Folk,” “Years and Years”), “Sin” revolves around a group of young friends, most of them gay men, who share an apartment in London in the 1980s. Ritchie (Olly Alexander) is an outgoing but struggling actor, at odds with his conservative family over his choice of theater instead of a career in law. Roscoe (Omari Douglas) runs away from his Nigerian immigrant family members after they attempt to pray his sexuality away, and eventually develops a relationship with a closeted politician (Stephen Fry). Colin ( Callum Scott Howells) is a quiet but eager Welsh kid desperate for connection in the big city, who learns about London’s gay community through a kindly co-worker (Neil Patrick Harris).
Added to the group are Ash (Nathaniel Curtis), a dashing teacher; Gregory (David Carlyle), the elder statesman of the group; and Jill (Lydia West), an actress who went to college with Ritchie and Ash and developed an intensely close friendship with them.
At first, the group, particularly Ritchie, is skeptical of whispered reports of a disease that only kills gay men, reveling in their newfound freedom to have sex, pursue their dreams and have fun away from parents and societal restrictions. But as friends are infected, the reality of the crisis sets in.
The way the characters fumble through trying to stay safe without ac
curate information, government guidance, or assistance is eerily reminiscent of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The series’ portrayal of the devastating homophobia of the government, medical system and society at the time is a biting indictment of those complicit in the epidemic that cost so many lives.
The young actors who make up the core of the cast are astoundingly skilled, especially Alexander and West. The frontman of music group Years & Years, Alexander brings charisma and magnetism to Ritchie, whose outward boisterousness is at odds with an internal shame. Jill occupies a unique space in the group, battling a disease for which she is at minimal risk, yet mostly powerless to help the friends who are dying around her. In a different, less capable production, Jill could be a cipher, simply there to add a female voice to a mostly male cast. But West and the script imbue her with depth and complexity.
There is terrible tragedy embedded into the framework of “Sin,” and the five-episode season includes a great deal of sadness.
But it is not unrelenting or exhausting – much like real life, sadness is mixed with humor and joy. “Sin” is not pedantic or homework to get through. It is engrossing and emotional, without becoming overwhelming.